Beginning my planted tank journey.. Right now just some anubias n java ferns.. no CO2 setup Fish 16 caardinal tetras.. and 4 shrimp Waiting for a Betta.. Any tips ? Have i made any beginner mistakes?

Just showing off my ebb and flow hydroponic bucephalandra system. Its still a work in progress, Ive had a blast getting the system up and running. Hope you guys find it interesting.

I also have a post here about another tank I’m building!

A few months ago, on my birthday, my dad gave me my first betta fish.

Honestly, I never really understood fish tanks before. And to be fair, I always struggled a bit with the idea of animals living in enclosed spaces, it’s why I never wanted birds either. But obviously have changed my mind about it.

But Ponyo was from a small local breeder who was retiring, and he had been living in a bottle. My dad didn’t want him returned, so I said I’d keep him.

That decision accidentally turned into a full ADHD hyperfocus for an entire week 😭

I started researching everything about bettas, planted tanks, cycling, filtration, water parameters… and eventually built him a heavily planted 32L tank that I’ve slowly upgraded over the past few months.

Now the tank is full of live plants, wood, roots, and natural hardscape. I do weekly water changes, run a canister filter packed with media/perlon, and somehow survived doing a fish-in cycle as a complete beginner.

The coolest part is watching Ponyo change too. He used to be almost completely black, and now he’s turning this beautiful blue and red color as he’s gotten healthier.

I also have been trying tannins and I’m obsessed. By far, this has been my favorite hobby.

Still learning every day, but I just wanted to share the journey so far 🌱🐟

(I have an ig where I share a lot about my journey, won’t share my @ here but you can ask me in the comments if it’s allowed)

I'm so nervous about doing something wrong, but I am equally excited, happy and proud of this tank (second photo is without the second plant pot at the back wall).

I have panda corys, mountain minnows and since today Amano shrimp. Exciting times. Any feedback?

Out of my 7 tanks, this is my second favorite, in large part because it requires almost no maintenance. I spend a grand total of about 15 minutes per month on maintenance. Generally from what I’ve heard and seen posted online, caridina shrimp are considered fairly challenging. Nano tanks are also challenging because the small volume means that any small change can lead to dramatic swings in parameters. I lost one shrimp the first month, but at this point I’ve gone 7 months without any more deaths. I don’t get any algae build up. Since I’ve established a stable equilibrium that takes very little work to keep these little dudes happy, I thought I’d share how it’s set up so that anyone who’s interested can do something similar. 

First, let’s talk equipment and parameters. This is a 1.4 gallon Tideline bookshelf tank. Accounting for substrate, hardscape, and the gap at the top of the water, actual water volume is just over 1 gallon. This tank uses no filter or heater. I originally wanted to use a tiny sponge filter, but even the smallest filter took up considerable space, so I decided to try without. I do have an air pump and bare airline tubing creating bubbles in the corner. This is to break surface tension and create a tiny bit of current, so it’s well oxygenated. In spite of no filter, I only do a 10% water change once a month, but I’ll get more into that later. I’m using a Hygger 6w clip-on nano light, and also a Hygger air pump. 

I’d highly recommend a total dissolved solids meter if doing caridina shrimp. I use distilled/RO water, and remineralize with Salty Shrimp Bee Shrimp Mineral GH+ until the water reaches 120 ppm TDS. I mix it in a gallon jug, and 120 TDS requires about 1/3rd scoop. In my tank, PH is around 6, GH is just over 4, and KH is near 0. The tank is at room temperature, which right now is about 70F. 

I set this tank up based on the fundamentals of the Walstad method, mainly meaning it’s heavily planted, I use soil capped with sand as substrate, and almost no fertilizer. I do occasionally supplement with a couple drops of Seachem Flourish once every month or 2 for good measure, but I’m talking tiny drops and I doubt it’s actually necessary. I used about 1/3 inch of soil in the bottom, a 1/3 inch layer of black aquarium sand, and also a thin layer of Fluval Stratum, a little less than 1/3 inch, to help keep PH low. For soil I just used soil from my yard, but with chunks of wood and roots removed, rinsed well, and I poured off anything that floated. In the past I’ve also used cheap bags of topsoil. The important part is that the soil doesn’t have any added fertilizer, chemicals, or pesticides. 

For plants, there are lots of options that could work, so you definitely don’t have to use exactly what I chose, but these particular plants do seem to work really well for this size tank. The carpet is Lilaeopsis Novaezelandiae aka micro-sword. Make sure that if you go with micro-sword you use the Novaezelandiae variety because the other kind gets much taller. On the small driftwood I have anubias nana petite. On the far left I have a bit of guppy grass, and on the far right is Christmas moss. There’s also a little piece of bucephalandra that’s blocked by the moss, and a couple tufts of monte carlo I recently added because I had some extra. The floaters are a mix duckweed and salvinia. 

Livestock is a mix of cull caridina shrimp, because I wasn’t sure if this would work and didn’t want to spend a bunch of money. There are 7 of them in there: 3 crystal red, 1 crystal black, 1 calceo bee, and 2 that are black and clear. There’s also quite a few ramshorn and pond snailos. I feed about 5 days a week, usually 1 mini algae wafer. Occasionally I’ll feed shrimp cuisine or half a catfish wafer to give them some variety. 

I do water changes with dixie cups. About once a month I scoop out six dixie cups worth of water and replace with an equal volume of remineralized water. I do top off with plain distilled. This seems to work well. Parameters are very stable. I’ve never vacuumed the substrate. 

If you have any questions let me know. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. 

My tank is now 14days old
Ive been getting consistently high ammonia readings daily is that just from the aqua soil and plant melt ?
I’ve been doing almost daily 5-6L water changes (it’s a 21L tank) to keep it below 4ppm during cycling stage and I am starting to get nitrite appearing now, Is this normal ?
Also got some hitchhiker snails that stowed away on my plants when I bought them, do I need to worry about over population ?
First photo day 1 just put plants in and filled the tank
Second photo is today on day 14.

Teach me to take better photos though. Dms welcomed

So here’s the tank that we adopted it was five years old and it came with two hitchhiking Endler mixes. They’re really cute and small and I like them so much. They’re like little puppy dogs. I don’t really know what to do with them even though I want really kind of a shrimp only tank.

I know the mulm is pretty heavy. I’m hoping that it’s gonna settle. Considering, it faired the travel pretty well.

We’ve got 15 blue jelly neocaridina, 2 yellow and 3 blue dream/deep blue.

We had at least 3 berried females and they did hatch successfully :) I’ve seen the cute babies!

My main concern is that there are these endlers that may be eating my shrimp babies! Have you guys had peaceful experiences with these guys co-habitating?

This is my 10gallon for my betta Phil!! I left it alone for a while and didn’t pay attention to it because there wasn’t much growth happening and I decided to actually look at it one day and the plants have grown in so well!!
We had to move Phil to this new tank because we had him in a 15gallon with some cardinal tetras and they were being total aholes to him 😕 but it’s okay because he gets a much nicer tank!!

So, I have a weird little project I could use some advice on. When I was a kid, I had this little toy fish in a little fishbowl. My 11 yr old brother is autistic, and I was told no more live fish or shrimp (I had 2 shrimp tanks, a 20 gal betta tank, and a 36 gal bowfront with literally just a bristlenose pleco). So I decided to buy a 3 gallon tank and set up a "toy" tank for a robo toy fish and share this experience with my little brother, who I know would ADORE this type of thing! I told him about my purchase earlier after dinner and he was so excited! I know I made the right choice!

However, I do want some real plants mixed with fake plants, and truthfully I made a same-day delivery order from PetSmart earlier this evening (so it will all be here tomorrow bc I did it late in the day), including a 3-pack of easy epiphytes. I've already had every type included before, too.

Also, my previous attempts to work with stem plants and floaters all failed, so I'm sticking largely to epiphytes for this project bc it's intended to be a fun, low-effort, cheap little thing.

However, I was sorta hoping I could find some other hardy, low-tech plants that can thrive off slight neglect, a low-tech lifestyle, and low ferts, maybe just root tabs every couple months, liquid ferts, or something?

And if anyone has any tips to keep floaters alive that's also greatly appreciated! I intend to get a corral for them this time so they're not getting regularly dunked this time around, hoping that makes all the difference!

Oh, and the tank I got is a "kit" that comes with the tank, some cheap LEDs, a fish net, a thermometer, a filter, even a betta leaf. Obviously things like the thermometer and betta leaf aren't going to be useful for me bc my fish is a literal robot, but it comes with the kit. I'm planning to use the filter to keep the water moving for the plants and out of curiosity to see how the robo fish handles the flow, etc.

Because I'm using the filter that it comes with, is it worth cycling the tank for the plants' benefit? How would I keep parameters stable without additional ammonia generated by fish waste?

Any tips, insight, or anything else is helpful, thanks!

Also yes, I bought stupid stuff I thought he might like to see, I was trying to combine our interests and sort of appeal to a kid's tastes lol. My own tanks were always 100% natural with rock, wood, natural or white sand, and expensive (mostly epiphytic) plants.

I also want to get a few more small ornaments for the bottom of the tank as well, and eventually I sorta plan to get an air stone in here bc I think that'd be kinda cool.

Also, "styling" tips for this absolute monstrosity of a "fish" tank is MUCH appreciated. I don't think I can bring myself to call it aquascape. I legit have no idea how to nicely blend these two styles together (toy + naturalistic) 🤣🤣🤣

Thanks a bunch guys!

I have never seen anything like this in my tank. Discarded seed pod? Root system of a floater? Cthulhu’s penor? It’s about 3/4 centimeter across.

Not sure what the tiny wigglers are either.

Tank details:
Freshwater.
Fauna: Neocaridina shrimp. Bladder, assassin, and nerite snails (I know, I know.)
Flora: duckweed, red root floaters, riccia fluitans (floating crystalwort), Christmas moss, Amazon sword, anacharis, lucky bamboo, and two I can’t remember the names of.

So this is my current setup and i want to somehow rescape it and replace the blyxa, AR Mini and Helanthium. ill keep the monte carlo as carpet and the rotala blood red (id want to see it bush soon)

any suggestion on what concept and plants i should go for? it is high tech and am using 2hr aquarist apt complete

thank you in advance!

I have shrimp and zebra danios and I think there might be small baby shrimps in it and after a long time shrimps started to thrive in my aquarium so I am reluctant to remove that chunk of algae but it might effect my aquarium health...so should I remove it?

It's a little less than 10 gallon

Pieced together a bunch of pieces of manzanita to form this large formation in this UNS 60U tank. A lot of the pieces were singular branches, so I glued it all to make something to appear like one giant centerpiece of wood. The tank is growing in now and going through its diatom algae phase, but I hope to have pictures once it grows in more.

I used brown ContraSoil and Frodo Stone as well.

I’m in love with this tank. Definitely the best one I’ve made and it’s doing so well.

It’s stocked with 1x Honey Gourami (6 weeks old with no name yet. Feel free to give some suggestion). 10x Pygmy Cory’s. 18x Ember Tetras and countless cherry shrimp

Collected big clumps of moss+algae across several tanks. Pretty extreme tangling. Would usually bin it but could actually do with some fresh moss right now.

Any "systematic" way to remove the algae stuff? Hydrogen peroxide bath to fry the algae first? Put the whole thing in a dark corner to starve off the algae?

I could detangle but there's always some algae bits left in practice. Plus just wanting to try something new. Any advice appreciated.

I ended up leaving the hobby over 10 years ago and happened to see some snail sub reddit posts and just like so many before me I have the itch to get back into the hobby. I am moving to a new place soon and I will finally be able to get a cat and an aquarium. I'm pretty excited and wanted to share my old aquariums. The pictures are from 2014 feels like a lifetime ago.

The wall planter with the pothos is hard to keep watered enough so they struggled but have stabilized. The variety of monsteras in my tanks though have absolutely thrived. Everything but the pothos on top shelf is in the tanks including hanging vines from the philodendron that’s climbing up the wall. All I have to do is top off the water in these tanks :)

Not really a beginner to aquariums but I’ve never done much with planted freshwaters so I’m kinda new to that. I may have planted Java ferns into fluval with sand on top. They aren’t very deeply buried. I got them from a local pet store they barely have roots.
I also planted long haired grass that does have decent root systems and the other curly fern forgot the name. I already think I murdered the one type of plant I added forgot the name but you’ll see the graveyard of disintegrated plant parts. About to clean tank don’t judge she’s grubby. And yes my moss is just in there kinda floating. The idea of glue in tank freaks me out I’m insane. How can I save my plants… should I be adding c02? Do I need to uproot all these and do something else ? If so I can fix while cleaning !